Nokia Music+ subscription now available in the UK

Turn your Lumia Windows Phone on and tune in, folks as Nokia Music+ is now available in the UK. The newly launched service offers more features and functionality to those who already enjoy Nokia Music, for a small monthly fee. We last looked at the service when a handful of clients were teased in a video explaining what the service is all about.

So just what is Nokia Music+ all about and what can it do for you? Is it worth the monthly fee? In a sense, yes. But only if you actively use Nokia Music. It's the same with any subscription you fork out for. The service is available on Windows Phone, but clients will also be released for Windows 8 / RT as well as a universal HTML5 option.

Unlimited skips. Whether you like to skip from track to track, or just want extra control over what you hear. There’s no stopping you with Nokia Music+.

Unlimited downloads. The free service allows you to download up to four Mixes (each of which contains hours of music) and play them without an Internet connection. The paid service removes this limit – you can download a massive supply of offline music you can swap as you wish.

Higher quality. We were surprised by the high quality of streaming music from Nokia Music, even over a 2.5G connection. Nokia Music+ allows you to download music at eight times the existing quality. Plus, you can set rules to only download high quality when you’re on WiFi, for example.

Lyrics. Words to the songs you’re listening to, right on your Nokia Lumia. Either in a scrolling list, Karaoke-style format, or a display you can scroll up and down.

Available for €3.99 / $3.99 / £3.99 a month, it's not an expensive subscription by any means. There's also a 7 day trial available. We've taken Nokia Music+ for a spin and it appears to work as well as hoped. It's definitely an option worth considering if Xbox Music or individually purchasing tracks are not really up your street.

You can either try the trial out, or upgrade your account by heading into the Nokia Music app (supported countries only). Hitting up the Settings area will reveal the upgrade to Nokia Music+ option. Fear not if you don't wish to upgrade. If you're happy with the standard Nokia Music service, then continue using it as you have done up to this point.

We're expecting Nokia Music+ to continue rolling out in a number of markets.

I must say, this disappoints me. There is simply not enough control over Nokia Music+ to make it worth it for me. As I brought up in the initial reveal post about this, I cannot control the content well enough. They really need to allow you to block explicit songs.

On top of that, they need to take a page from Last.FM, by allowing you to "love" or "block" a track. It's great that they give you this deep playlist of music for free, but it sucks when you have to spend 5 minutes getting to a song you actually WANT to hear on it. I would say that I spend AT LEAST 30% of my time on Nokia Music skipping tracks (by starting different playlists, which doesn't count towards the skip limit). I keep WANTING to love Nokia Music, but I end up back at Xbox Music and my local library because of how much music I do NOT like that ends up in a playlist (especially explicit stuff).

I'd love if you could manually add tracks to a playlist and make them that way, but I fully understand that they have to put restrictions on that stuff to keep the executives at the labels appeased. However, the playlists can be kind of bad at times as well. I have an issue where almost every playlist I've made (regardless of included artists) ends up with probably around 50% of their tracks shared across multiple others, a good deal of which are tracks I do not like. So while you can get unlimited playlist downloads here, there is also the issue that most of my playlists will be EXTREMELY redundant, as they already are.

Last point: Audio quality. I love the added feature, but given the state of the service, it actually causes more problems. Higher audio quality means more storage space used. I already have about 17 GB of music on my Lumia 920, with less than 4 GB of storage left on my device. Increasing the audio quality will quickly eat away at that, as will the increase in allowed playlists. Yes, I know the obvious answers to those complaints are "don't download the higher-quality playlists," and "don't download a bunch of playlists," but then we're in a position where I am paying $4 per month for unlimited skips, which I already get (because, again, starting a new playlist then restarting the other does not count towards the skips, though it is a bit inconvenient).

I cannot complain much about the lyrics, though. I COULD complain that it'll use data, but a tiny text file won't do anything to hamper my storage space, realistically. It's a nice touch for the service, and it'd be REALLY cool if you could access the lyrics while listening to local music.

Overall, I'd probably say that the service, for my personal interests, gets a D. The cost is perfectly acceptable, but there is so little control over what I can and cannot hear (mostly what I can avoid) that it ruins it for me. If they simply added an explicit filter, it'd get a C for me. If they added overall track blocking (meaning if you blocked a track, it would be omitted from future downloads), I'd give it a B without question.
Nokia relaly should attempt to mimic, work with, or buy Last.FM to power this service. They could have a truly special service if they were willing to be like Last.FM with downloadable playlsits added in. I made a lengthy post because I'm big on listening to music, and I want Nokia Music to be an outstanding service, but they're two or three big features away from becoming a legitimate option for me.

You completely missed what I said, I think. I'm not asking for non-explicit versions of songs. I'm asking for songs that are explicit to be removed. I do not listen to artists with explicit lyrics, and I don't want them in the playlists I create. I'd like a way to keep songs with explicit lyrics off of my playlists, not ways to get edited songs.

But why? Surely you can avoid explicit tracks with your choice of artists? Hip hop and r and b and other categories are going to have explicit songs by their very nature. Classical on the other hand won't. Are you a prude?

As to "[s]urely you can avoid explicit tracks with your choice of artists?" Nope, not at all. I have a playlist of all heavy Christian music on my phone right now that is tagged as "Explicit." That is because Christian artists have a tendency to cross into the secular realm, especially on tours, so there are similar bands to Christian bands that aren't Christian.

I don't at all listen to rap, but to act as if explicit lyrics are limited to those genres (or that those genres are all filled with explicit lyrics) is speaking completely outside of experience on the matter.

So you ask for clarification--twice--then tell me to "get over it." Why not just START with this comment, so I know that engaging in conversation with you will offer no value to my life, waste my time, and allow me to quickly peg you as a person not worth responding to?

Oh, I guess that would be because that's the goal of an Internet troll. Sorry I have moral standards, Internet troll.

I agree it will be nice to be able to have the option to block explicit tracks. I listen to a lot of hip hop and rnb and don't mind the swearing when its just me, but often when I am dropping off or picking up my kids I change the mix to UK singles chart for example and the songs that come up are often explicit and I have to skip them

I think that they are pretty poor comparisons right now. People are reporting many bugs with the WP8 Spotify app, while I've yet to have a Nokia Music bug whatsoever. I've never tried Spotify, but I'll also say that these are VERY different services, which is reflected in the $6 price difference (in the US).

Nokia Music is a great little service. The mixes are a breath of fresh air from listening to the music I own. It's also a great way to discover new bands. The subscription service isn't yet available here in Australia, but I will give it a go when it does arrive and an app for desktop/RT users is available.

Am already a paid subscriber to Nokia Music. Upgrading to Music + is a no brainer. Unlimited offline mixes download is what I most looking forward. Have to admit it. Nokia Music makes discovering new music a breeze. Waiting for it to launch here (India).

If you read my above comment, you'll see why I don't believe it to be a no-brainer. In fact, it is a pretty tough sell for me. As I mentioned, I have used up all but less than 4 GB of storage on my phone (mostly with my personal music library of 17-18 GB). That means I likely cannot take advantage of the higher-quality music (which means more storage) or the increased number of playlist downloads (which also means more storage).

That many playlists have music I have NO desire to listen to and that having remotely-similar artists over multiple playlists leads to rather heavy duplication in playlist creation again means it's a tough call to want or need MORE playlists, unless you have a MASSIVE interest in music genres (where having 4 playlists won't cover your interest in rap, metal, pop, rock, and country, haha).

If they gave just a LITTLE bit of control over downloads (meaning blocking explicit or generally-unwanted tracks), I think it would be an easy call to upgrade, but as I mentioned, a lot of my time using Nokia Music is spent skipping tracks because a) I do not like the track (lyrically or musically), b) I just heard the song in a different playlist, or c) I have the song in my personal library.

You're right, why should I have requests for stuff? I guess wanting Nokia to succeed and offer features is "complaining." In case you haven't noticed the obvious answer there, it's an extreme pain to spend thousands of dollars on music while going to school.

Oh, and yes, I could legitimately spend thousands of dollars on music if I bought enough to keep me entertained.

£4pm is cheap compared to £10pm for Rdio or Spotify. You lose the ability to play any track at any time, but I've found the range and quality of the mixes to be very good. I don't have time to be creating so many playlists for myself, so somebody else's playlist with unlimited skips works for me.
Unfortunately Nokia Music crashes if you try to start it in Flight Mode. If you start playing music on your device through Nokia Music and then turn on Flight Mode it hangs the entire phone. This is unbelievably bad! Lumia 920.